This is the most detailed PUBLIC AND COMPLETELY VERIFIABLE Dominion market analysis so far.Well, at least as far as I know, anyway... and you don't have to take my word for anything I say below, check and double-check, maybe I actually made some mistakes.

For those interested in getting the full work data, it's available for download in Excel97 and Excel2007 formats below :

NOTES ON DOWNLOADS* the Excel2007 files contain a lot of additional data, and in case any more changes appear on SiSi, they are very easily updated* the Excel97 files can still update some data (including alchemy ratios and market amounts), but the formatting is a bit uglier* the screenshots that will be posted below are all taken from the Excel2007 version

ALCHEMY ADJUSTMENTS

Now, I did also include in the very end one section on alchemy, and that needs a bit of additional explanation.

First off, it's next to impossible to determine the exact alchemy usage, because it depends on too many different factors.Basically, right now, the breakeven point (where you make no money but you lose no money) in alchemy is for price of replacement material ("low_ISK") = price of replaced material ("high_ISK") / the alchemy replacement rate (used to be 20, in dominion it's 5) - one hour's worth of medium tower fuel (used to be 100k or thereabouts) * (alchemyrate-1)/100.At the new alchemy rate and the old fuel costs, that means when low_ISK = (high_ISK/5) - 4000 ISK.Obviously, you want to make a profit or else there's no point in doing alchemy at all, so the price of the "low" material would have to be a bit below break-even value for you to start doing that.

Instead of doing countless calculations, I have implemented a simplified (and therefore not entirely accurate, but then again, what is) system to very roughly estimate the alchemy reactions being done.All you have to do is set a ROUGH price multiplier between low_ISK and high_ISK (the pairings are easily visible and you'll figure which is which) - basically, it makes YOU take a more or less informed guess as to what the maximum price ratios could be between the moon mineral pairs where people would consider starting to do alchemy.

The closer the number is to the alchemy rate, the more likely it is alchemy would start registering as profitable on that particular pair, and the rest is auto-estimated from there (amounts used, time spent, adjusted scarcities, etc).It's by no means fool-proof, but if you play around with those "trigger price ratios", you will see that the overall result is pretty robust and close enough to what actually happens.

WHAT IS BEING ANALYZED

The entire monthly trade of one region is broken down by T2 components, then by moon minerals used in the production of the components.Without knowing which and how many of the items are being sold directly to a customer by manufacturers, moved through a daytrader first, or resold by a previous customer, we have no choice but to assume the traded values are representative of the manufacture process (at least as far as ratios are concerned).Then, the same analysis is made using modified build amounts now live on SiSi, which may or may not be the final Dominion values.Finally, the differences between the current stuation and the upcoming Dominion situation are compared, with emphasis on percentual differences... since the amounts will undoubtedly change a lot after the patch (I'm giving some minor spoilers here - prices will generally go down and volumes up).

* all market trade data (over one month or better said 30 days) has been visually guesstimated in most cases, manually adding up market history data would have been way too time consuming on top of the already spent time - data should however be fairly accurate, at least ratio-wise (which is the whole point), and within acceptable margins of error

* this is ONLY "THE FORGE" (i.e. Jita) MARKET DATA, so game-wide usage might vary significantly ; however, the only large differences should be observed in racial carbide consumption, most of the rest of the things should be pretty spot-on

* all amounts and times are considered at perfect ME, perfect PE, but no skill nor installation construction time bonuses ; as such, usage amounts will actually be higher (usage ratios however should remain almost identical, only minor discrepancies) ; also, manufacture times will probably be noticeably lower (they're mostly orientative anyway)

* no, I did not check each and every non-ship T2 item, but those I did check were identical ; also, the combined T2 non-ship item T2 component-derived moon mineral usage accounts for less than 15% of most moon minerals (that I found out while filling the tables, feel free to check my statement by editing all ships count to zero on the appropriate sheet), or in other words, even if they did change some, the overall result would be insignificant

* yes, I did go on SiSi, and I did manually update each and every ship T2 component count* yes, I did take into account the fact the blueprints are at 0 ME not perfect build (if you open the Excel2007 file you should notice the auto-calcs) * yes, I did check most other T2 component blueprints, not just the racial armor plates, only the racial armor plates were changed (to 25 sec base build time instead of 150 and 10 sylramic instead of 30)

* the default assumption was that similar "in-game-value rarity" moon minerals are actually available for potential moon-mining in roughly the same amounts, and that the ratios of available moons respect the inverse baseprice ratios (i.e. there's 16 times more platinum moons than neodymium moons, and there are roughly the same number of neodymium moons as thulium moons, etc) * ovbiously, if this is NOT the case, the results should be pretty off on the "scarcity" calculations (and if you are to believe the prices we had the past two years, one can only assume EITHER that there's far less dysprosium moons compared to promethium moons OR that somebody is hoarding massive amounts of dysprosium for manipulation purposes) - no matter which is the actual thing happening, you really have to take this peculiarity into account

END OF BIG DISCLAIMERS

Just a reminder...Jita only accounts for a small-to-moderate percentage of the total game-wide T2 item trade volume (8% minimum, 20% maximum).However, it accounts for a very high percentage of moon minerals and advanced materials (?40%-80%?) and a significant percentage of T2 component trade (?20%-50%?).Try to keep that in mind when you look at the numbers "used up" per region via traded items and you compare them to the volumes of precursor materials traded in Jita on a regular basis.

Well, enough about all of this, I suppose you are waiting for actual numbers, eh ?Ok then, next post is mostly about numbers !

All following numbers assume that roughly the same number of items will be traded after Dominion hits.Obviously, it's not an accurate assessment, but the ratios of T2 item usage should remain roughly valid. I have already covered this in more detail in the posts above, so it would be pointless to repeat the same thing again.Bottom line, everything here is orientative.

As you can notice, there's a sharp drop in Fermionic Condensate usage (no surprise, that was the whole point of the Dominion changes) to less than a QUARTER of its previous usage levels ; at the same time, the drop in Ferrogel is much more mild, to roughly TWO THIRDS of its previous usage level.All carbides/carbonide roughly TRIPLE in usage, same as nanotransistors, while sylramic fibers "only" DOUBLE in usage.

Interesting to note that the total manufacturing time is not severely affected, thanks to the heavy reduction in racial armor plate manufacture time.

The POS reactor time nearly doubles however, especially that for complex reactions, and this is actually more or less a good thing, since Dominion will very likely see a lot of 0.0 POSes facing dismantling because they're no longer useful for sov-claiming... at least this way you could put some of the med/large POSes out there to good use reacting.

It's no big surprise that dysprosium and promethium take the lion's share, but, again, as mentioned before already, one has to wonder why the heck promethium is not more expensive than dysprosium (in market-price reality it's the complete opposite), and also how come neodymium isn't noticeably more expensive.

Notice how NOT ONLY the percentage of dysprosium and promethium out of the "total moon mineral basket" has gone down, but actual number of units used up has also plummeted for both, so what USED to be a heavy bottleneck should be almost completely removed... at least theoretically, the production capabilities of the game (as far as dysprosium and promethium is concerned) should nearly double.Now, one has to wonder however if the neodymium won't become the new bottleneck... still, there should be vast amounts of stockpiles of neodymium from back when it was severely underpriced, so I don't see any significant issues for the immediate future... and then there's the new and radically improved alchemy to the rescue.

Most other lowends are significantly boosted in relative importance, in particular scandium, tungsten, cobalt and titanium which, to be honest, really needed it. The fact the "moon junk" (gasses and such) also get somewhat of a boost is nice, but all in all not that relevant since the price for those will be set by the fuel costs anyway... still, it makes reactor placement on a moon where you can get at least some of the materials locally a relatively decent target to strive for, which is always a plus.

All in all, I'd have to say, it looks pretty good.

Now... the stuff I kept talking about, the alchemy adjustments... in the next post.

Posted - 2009.11.02 08:23:00 -
[4]So, here's how the moon mineral usage looks like after you TRY to estimate just how much (and if) some of the "linked" moon minerals are involved in alchemy reactions.

Like I warned several times already... this is highly EXPERIMENTAL and the numbers you see below should not be taken as "this is how it is".At best, it's a very, VERY rough guideline, to give you a general idea of the influence on scarcities (and therefore prices) of the materials involved in alchemy.

I have actually set absurdly high rates for "alchemy profitability" in the "current situation" scenario... but I have done this becase, let's face it, not many people have been bothering with alchemy.Still, to my surprise, it does indicate that chromium->promethium and cadmium->dysprosium are not only just profitable, but profitable for quite a lot of people (over one thousand alchemy POSes could probably be in use right now to account just for the Jita usage).

By the way, yes, if you do set alchemy profitability ratios the same as the alchemy rate, you should notice how the modified scarcity of the moon mineral pairs equalizes. Of course, in reality, it's never like that, and profitability ratio is higher than alchemy ratio (I have explained why, and also given the breakeven price formula in one of the above posts).

I tried to be conservative in my estimates, but I might have actually been TOO conservative.In reality, the alchemy profitability ratio for platinum->neodymium could eventually reach a value as low as 6, or even 5.5, not just the estimated 8... in which case, the need for neodymium will drop radically, and the need for platinum will increase heavily.

All in all, I would say that the system is pretty decently self-regulating, however that will also mean platinum could see (LONG-TERM only) an astonishingly high price increase... say, something up to the tune of 15k per unit at worst, probably less than 10k though.Short-term however, that will not be a problem - unless speculation strikes - the neodymium (and neodymium-related) stocks should be relatively high, so but given the volumes involved, speculators will either have to wait a long time to see a big profit, or get a small profit and not drive price up too fast.

Another issue, the only reason you see a sharp drop in percentages for cadmium is that it's no longer all that profitable to react at the chosen alchemy ratios post-Dominion compared to current ratios, so even if the raw usage is actually going up, the (ESTIMATED) alchemy usage is going down much more.Again, as stated, I might have underestimated the profitable alchemy ratios, so cadmium could just as well stay put or even go up, depending where price of everything else stabilizes (and also depending on POS hourly operating costs post-Dominion).

In conclusion, even if nothing changes on SiSi anymore, I can say that I am generally happy with the way things look for the markets : * moon-mineral bulk value spread across more minerals (5 to 7 instead of just 2 like before)... so the bottlenecks are at least temporarily alleviated, and higher volumes can start flowing*** all are relatively decent, with the exception of poor, poor THULIUM, which got the very short end of the stick this time around (as if it didn't have it bad enough already).* no radical manufacture slot time increase, so no radical additional overhead* needed reactor times increase, which compensates to some degree for the upcoming "uselessness" of 0.0 POSes

Of course, some things could just as well change on SiSi by tomorrow, so I'd have to restart the analysis.Well, ok, not restart, just slightly adjust... but all the nice pictures and stuff won't be all that appropriate anymore :P

Posted - 2009.11.02 10:09:00 -
[14]
You have to consider the fact that the old bottlenecks are shifted/reduced, so the "basket price" of moon minerals will also shift (downwards, but by how much, that's yet another question I can't answer with absolute certainty)... it makes things a bit more complicated especially since at this time stockpiles of materials, pre-speculated false scarcity which will now pop (or not) and other such things that could tweak the end results... those are mostly an unknown quantity.

Posted - 2009.11.02 10:16:00 -
[15]
"one has to wonder why the heck promethium is not more expensive than dysprosium (in market-price reality it's the complete opposite), and also how come neodymium isn't noticeably more expensive."This shows that your calculation of supply/demand contains a substantial error. Dysp is historically twice the price of Prom, whereas your analysys shows it should be cheaper.

"let's face it, not many people have been bothering with alchemy."Almost all the Cadmium moons owners that I know of, tell me that they do alchemy. I think most Cadmium and Cromium is currently used for alehemy.

Originally by:zzCoins"one has to wonder why the heck promethium is not more expensive than dysprosium (in market-price reality it's the complete opposite), and also how come neodymium isn't noticeably more expensive."This shows that your calculation of supply/demand contains a substantial error. Dysp is historically twice the price of Prom, whereas your analysys shows it should be cheaper.

The last group of the "big disclaimer" post section already addresses that, presenting possible reasons as to why that is.You're not saying anything that I haven't already said, and you can be quite sure that other MD regulars can corroborate the data - IF promethium and dysprosium moons would be both equally available and exploited by people who price-gouge at the same rate, promethium would be more expensive than dysprosium.The two possible reasons why that's not the case are either a vast disparity in exploitable moons or a player-alliance-orchestrated artificial scarcity campaign.Which one of those two scenarios is true (or if the truth is a bit of both), only a CCP employee with "data mining" rights could find out - meanwhile, the only remaining option for us (the people with limited knowledge) is to not look at absolute percentages, but instead at percentage changes, because those should keep being affected by the same factors - which is EXACTLY the whole point of this entire analysis, to auto-compensate for those disparities.

Quote:"let's face it, not many people have been bothering with alchemy."Almost all the Cadmium moons owners that I know of, tell me that they do alchemy. I think most Cadmium and Cromium is currently used for alchemy.

You can have at most around 80% of the total Cadmium/Chromium production used up in alchemy, even if you go by a "I operate the POS at zero cost because I mine the ice myself" and react for a loss (to see that hypothetical situation, set "alchemy profitability ratio" equal to the actual alchemy ratio.In THAT completely absurd case, you still have only around 2500 alchemy POSes running, which account for only an equivalent 125 hours of normal reactions, out of roughly 3300 normal reaction POSes and 1300 complex ones (or in fuel terms, 2600+ equivalent simple ones). Also, in that absurd situation, you would see long-term equilibrium price ratios between chromium/cadmium and dysprosium/promethium of close to 1:20, which you DON'T see in reality.Basically, at a never-reasonable absolute absurd maximum, that's 3 out of 10 "equivalent" POSes (fuel-wise) that do alchemy - THAT is what I meant by "not many people".

Coincidentally, the "before dominion" alchemy screenshot shows around 55% of used chromium and 72% of used cadmium being shoved into alchemy reactions, for a grand total of 1127 alchemy POSes (or, 16 out of 100 fuel-equivalent reaction POSes are alchemy POSes).So, yeah, you are correct in that most Cadmium/Chromium _IS_ mainly being used for alchemy right now, however, speaking long-term sustainable chains, alchemy reactions POSes are not that common compared to regular reaction POSes - and, again, THAT is what I meant when I said "not many people". 16%-30% of "total reaction effort" does not "many" make, at least not in my book. "Some", at best, but not "many".

Posted - 2009.11.02 11:53:00 -
[19]
Nice write up and analysis Akita. We agree on many aspects and I disagree with a couple, but that would be expected.

We could openly discuss them but that would be giving away too much of my own analysis and predictions. My RL company I work for spent too much money developing the programs and application for this kind of stuff. It's bad enough I am using them for free.

Just a side note though.... I love games like this that are deep in content and strategy. Good job CCP.

Well, I spent about three days on it doing some other things meanwhile too, so if it's generally pushing out mostly similar answers to some expensive analysis software, I'd say I'm generally fine with that much accuracy.Besides, I can tell everybody exactly what I did, and can put a finger and tell you what everything is, while on the other hand you're somewhat reserved even for something as direct as the points you disagree on, so...

...anyway, I'm fully aware this is only orientative (especially the alchemy part), so I am sure that if somebody tries hard enough they could find plenty of flaws ("ratios estimated for alchemy profitability too far off", "why use that formula for alchemy trigger instead of something else", "why not adjust for new perceived bottleneck also", "why not attempt to calculate prices too", "what about items that usually resell vs items that are normally consumed" and so on and so forth).Problem with all of those is "I can't know, so I can only try to estimate".And everybody else around here, feel free to volunteer additional informations, make estimates about, well, anything, and pool our brains together to see what gets out of it (if anything).I've done the grunt work already, did preliminary formatting and estimates, the rest is all yours (the general public) - you have all the data I have, exactly as I have it.

P.S. For instance - if anybody has a "game-wide moon count", please do post it.What I mean by that is simply "total number of moons for each material" (and maybe also total number of moons scanned), for as much space as you have knowledge of, from any possible source. Not locations, just totals (and leave out the bottom 8 moon minerals, those are irrelevant, if a moon only has those, you can list it as "empty" ; only the top 12 moon minerals are important)... per entire constellation, per entire region, per entire game, whatever you have, if you have it.

Posted - 2009.11.02 13:25:00 -
[21]
Just a note for it being The Forge markets only.eve-central.com has a nightly data dump you can use, if you import this into SQL and do this in code you wouldn't have to manually gather data.However, this is just my way of doing things. You might not have that option...

Either way, if you would want something along those lines then feel free to contact me and it can assist you free of charge in mining that data and making useful calculations if you provide the formulas you want to run and whatnot.

DISCLAIMER:

It's quite possible your requests will be beyond my abilities but i at the very least offer to try.

Originally by:CaddeJust a note for it being The Forge markets only. eve-central.com has a nightly data dump you can use, if you import this into SQL and do this in code you wouldn't have to manually gather data. However, this is just my way of doing things. You might not have that option...

The problem with eve-central is that all data is based on user-reported orders, with no actual transaction history. Some items might not have been uploaded at all except some remote regions, other items might have been selectively loaded only in some regions, orders that expired could register as transactions done and so on and so forth. I'd much rather extrapolate the entire game world's transaction from certain Jita historic transaction volumes than try to import the hand-picked data from eve-central.

Quote:Either way, if you would want something along those lines then feel free to contact me and it can assist you free of charge in mining that data and making useful calculations if you provide the formulas you want to run and whatnot.

The only calculation/estimation I need is this : total (average/estimated/approximate) number of units (batches) traded in one month (30 days), for each and every T2 item that can be manufactured.Right now, my spreadsheets contain that data (there's a monthly total estimate for every last one), but only for "The Forge" region, not the entire game.

Quote:It's quite possible your requests will be beyond my abilities but i at the very least offer to try.

I'm not sure I could get that data in a reliable fashion via EVE-Central.

Fair enough.It's just something i feel is off when looking at one market only such as Jita which isn't even close to representing an universe average. Also, I'm pretty sure eve-central doesn't count expired orders as volume traded. Each order has an orderID and that is what is used to track what is moving. If that orderID expires it isn't counted as a transaction.The problem is that it's random windows looking into the market and they are opened at random times. But i still feel they represent a far better average than looking at Jita because Jita is it's own market in eve. Everything outside The Forge is pretty much unrelated to Jita prices. As soon as you come into Forge you see a whole different market.

Non-ship T2 items account for about 1/6 of the total material consumption for Jita trade, so even if the item market would be vastly different in other regions, it can't be that far off to make a significant dent in the true overall ratios compared to what you see in Jita only.As for ships, I seriously doubt people "somewhere else" buy a truckload more interceptors and absolutely no command ships to make a difference... anyway, other than the racial carbides, ships of the same class have roughly the same advanced material make-up ; not just that, but even across ship sizes/roles, advanced material make-up is pretty similar, so again, all of this could have easily been solved by taking one random ship in each size class and making a weighted average, the end ratios would also have been pretty close to what you see.

But, if you like, feel free to take one of the spreadsheets, then* either extract JUST the "T2 item - market volume" area (it's colored differently, it should be easy to notice) and parse whatever source you like and fill in the volumes you prefer for any number of sources or regions, then I'll reintegrate that data in the sheets and see how each individual batch and the sum of all batches looks like (percentually speaking) compared to what it's already inside now* or just fill in the existing data, adding separate source/region data directly into the spreadsheet and watch the totals change in real-time

Posted - 2009.11.02 17:17:00 -
[25]
You went to the component level, why not ship level?

When I created my analysis years ago I came across the issue of day traders. The amount of ships sold over the space of 2-3 months was no where near the amount of components sold. Which is why in the end I used ship movement as the base of consumption. While I imagine some ships are purchased and resold it's no where near the amount that is components and reactions where. Just so you know, it can be as much as four times the component and reaction movement compared to actual consumption in ships.

Originally by:Akita TP.S. For instance - if anybody has a "game-wide moon count", please do post it.

There are at least 126 Dysprosium and 179 Promethium moons. Those numbers include all of empire and most of 0.0, with complete counts for the major high-end moon regions. I think the total numbers are probably not more than 20% higher.

The higher number of promethium moons may partly explain the historically lower price compared to dysprosium.

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